Michael’s Comments (group member since Mar 07, 2009)

Michael’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Good to see Poe make this list.

1. There is a reference, which I cited earlier, to Hal and others digging up Himself's grave. Since the master tape was buried with Himself, there might be a connection here.

2. The important thing, whatever the cause of HAL's problems communicating, is that the narrative is circular, and that understanding the beginning of the book makes much more sense after reading through to the end and circling back to start over again.

BTW, thoroughly enjoying The Broom of the System I received as an Xmas present.
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Hey - I got The Broom of the System for Xmas! Might be taking a detour from the IJ reread. :)

Another nominee for all time classic snippet, from the AA meeting: "Me friends, this tard'o'mine practically had a poolse." ;)

Jim wrote: "Michael wrote: "Speaking of which, think of the arc on those great canisters of waste being shot over the border into the great concavity..."

Kind of like the arcs of the Eschaton lobs."

Finished the section on Orin's punting career - just a classic example of the transcendental arc theme in this book. Of course, this coming just prior to Poor Tony's bottoming out.

But to Orin's punts, " punting's pull for him, that a lot of it seemed emotional and/or even, if there was such a thing anymore, spiritual: a denial of silence: here were upwards of 30,000 voices, souls, voicing approval as One Soul. He invoked the raw numbers. The frenzy. He was thinking out loud here. Audience exhortations and approvals so total they ceased to be numerically distinct and melded into a sort of single coital moan, one big vowel, the sound of the womb, the roar gathering, tidal, amniotic, the voice of what might as well be God."

Now there is a parabola for ya.
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Les wrote: "Alyosha comparison only goes so far. I remember Alyosha as being a beautiful..."

If not Alyosha, then maybe Prince Myshkin? Like Myshkin, Mario is innocent, naïve, impractical, compassionate, and immensely kind, which leads most to consider him an "idiot."
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Hugh wrote: "A thought: We don't have to create a compendium of quotable lines but for THIS particular group of readers, I'm curious what some of your favorite lines or short passages are..."

The ETA Motto has to be on our short list of quotable lines, "They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier".

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Les wrote: "To an earlier question, it does get easier. I am almost 25 % through at this point. Over a hundred of those pages were in the last day or so because I simply could not put it down. It is vast, but is beginning to make more sense and the connections appear to becoming clearer. His language is amazing and the poeticism referred to by many other earlier is now obvious and frequent...."

Les, I hear you. "Keep coming back." At some point after Poor Tony loses it in spectacular fashion on the subway, the book went from slog to pure page turner for me. The AA meeting circa pages 340 - 375 is riveting.
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RE: DFW Vocab

Just to digress a minute from thematic concerns: you just have to love DFW's word choice throughout. I was struck reading one of his essay and his use there of the word "ayatolloid" - I am rating this neologistic, how 'bout you? - but we find a slew of such adjectives in IJ using the 'iod" suffix, some of which it turns out are legitimate like,

teratoid - abnormal in form or development; malformed.
lithioid - resembling stone or rock

And a ton of legitimate spacial adjectives, e.g.

cardioid - heart shaped
conoid
cycloid
ovaloid
ovoid - egg shaped
paraboloid
rhombusoid
trapezoid

But I particularly like the home-made adjectives he comes up with, e.g.

Eskimoid
batsoid - as in, "it drove him batsoid"
dipsoid - as in, possessing the character of a dipshit
Medusoid
triviumoid - pertaining to the classical trivium cirriculum
vegetoid
etc.

If you are at all interested in DFW vocab, you should check out the following site. I found this a great site to surf through:

http://definitivejest.blogspot.com/
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Ry wrote: "I think my favorite section might be the "Tennis and the Feral Prodigy" section..."

Yes Ry, I liked that section too. I thought it went well with the "exotic facts" you learn if you stay at a rehab facility, circa pg 200, which follows closely the section you mention. I think if I ever re-read this puppy a 3rd time I will recognize these two sections as the beginning of the end of the slow slog of a read we now know as The First 200 Pages.
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Here is a reference [spoiler alert]

"Molly Notkin tells the U.S.O.U.S. operatives that her understanding of the après-garde Auteur J. O. Incandenza's lethally entertaining Infinite Jest (V or VI) is that it features Madame Psychosis as some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death, sitting naked, corporeally gorgeous, ravishing, hugely pregnant, her hideously deformed face either veiled..."

Jim wrote: "Do you have any thoughts on the connection with Greek philosophy and the concept of metempsychosis ..."

I am trying to locate the reference, but I do know off the top of my head that the uber-lovely Madam P. is cast by JOI as Death in many of his films. I also did note that Madam P. spent her radio hour reading the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed's "circular", which I found noteworthy. ;)

I also did want to say I really enjoyed "the five minutes of dead air Madame Psychosis's contract stipulates gets to precede her show". Cute, DFW little details.
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Hugh wrote: "("has she or has she not been deformed in the acid attack?")..."

He also leaves "acid" ambiguous here too - could refer to LSD-25 or even the dreaded "acid on acid", DMZ.

The Joelle sections - the Madam Psychosis radio show, and her walk from Beacon Hill through the Back Bay to her own personal Last Party – stand up pretty well on second reading.

Madam P. says on her radio show “Medusas and odalisques both: Come find common ground.”

Joelle, a.k.a. Madam P., a.k.a. The Prettiest Girl of All Time (PGOAT), is either stunningly, crippling beautiful to behold, or now deformed by a targeted acid attack or a propeller accident. My bet is that, as the lead character in the Entertainment, the former is still the case. Though who knows, what with the veil and all.

I do read, however, in the long sections describing her state of mind, that her own personal cage of addiction (“powerless over this cage, this unfree show, weeping…) is not unlike two of JIO’s better films:

Cage III — Free Show
The Medusa v. the Odalisque

We find this quote on pg. 20, “How many sub-rosa twins are there, out there, really? What if heredity, instead of linear, is branching? What if it's not arousal that's so finitely circumscribed? What if in fact there were ever only like two really distinct individual people walking around back there in history's mist? That all difference descends from this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside-down in a convex lens.”
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Hugh wrote: "One BIG theme of this book seems to me to be the ennui of feeling of characters feeling disconnected from anything greater in the world and the deeper, scarier reality of our connections. (And the implications (responsibilities) that come with those. (connections, that is.)..."

I think you are on to something central here, Hugh; the counterpoint to this thematic Isolation being the thematic Addiction we have discussed before, individuals “giving themselves away” to another thing in order to forge such a connection.

(In the Ennet House, this would be termed a "Boundary Issue". LOL)

I was struck by the catalog of abusable escapes in the excellent section (pg. 200 – 210) on “facts learned from spending a little time around a substance recovery halfway facility” (e.g. “That God — unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both — speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God”),

...that gambling can be an abusable escape, too, and work, shopping, and shoplifting, and sex, and abstention, and masturbation, and food, and exercise, and meditation/prayer...”

This catalog is then continued into footnote #70, e.g.

“...12-Step thought, yoga, reading, politics, gum-chewing, crossword puzzles, solitaire, romantic intrigue, charity work, political activism, N.R.A. membership, music, art, cleaning, plastic surgery, cartridge-viewing even at normal distances, the loyalty of a fine dog, religious zeal, relentless helpfulness, relentless other-folks'-moral-inventory-taking, the development of hardline schools of 12-Step thought, ad darn near infinitum, including 12-Step fellowships themselves...”

DFW then takes this to a solipsistic extreme in footnote #70 and imagines the bare, nude, unfurnished existence of one “too advanced to stomach the thought of the potential emotional escape of doing anything whatsoever, completely motion- and escape-less...”

The author seems to be describing Boundary Issues of his own, n’est pas?
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Hugh wrote: ""...could he have cut these 8 pages with no loss to the reader? ..."

In a sense, this is something I have been up against generally on this second read through the book. Admittedly, these first 200 pages can be something of a slog – I admit it, there are a couple sections I even skipped altogether – and this gets me to thinking: on the first read-through I, maybe naively, felt as if I was watching the author warm to his story. The narrative got better and better, and then the magic pen just started to flow after a while. The DFW prose circa page 700 is on the whole a quantum leap better than the prose circa page 100. We see flashes of this genius narrator early on, but the voice just kept getting stronger and stronger as I read on into the book. This assumed, of course, that the book was written somewhat sequentially.

But now, as a second time reader and somewhat of a proselytizer for the book, I find myself in the strange position of admonishing my co-readers to “keep coming back”, or to “just hang in there” through these initial, weaker opening 200 pages. And I am beginning to wonder if the author purposely constructed the novel this way! NO author in his right mind would purposefully reinforce the “just hang in there” message that is pounded into us later on by making his readers endure a couple hundred pages of lesser writing. Would he?

I mean, why did he include the absurd/jokey Workmen's Comp claim? (p. 138)
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Sandra wrote: "Now in regards to why I found the video-phone..."

Jane's Morning Mask. Score 1000 points to Sandra: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0idWiH...

Jim wrote: "Kind of like the arcs of the Eschaton lobs."

Bingo.

Patty wrote: "Michael wrote: "Patty wrote: "I somehow missed, the first time around, the importance of annulation."

Speaking of which, think of the arc on those great canisters of waste being shot over the border into the great concavity.

Patty wrote: "I somehow missed, the first time around, the importance of annulation."

There is a good example of this in the section on the demise of videophony.

The career of videophony conforms neatly to this curve's classically annular shape: First there's some sort of terrific, sci-fi-like advance in consumer tech — like from aural to video phoning — which advance always, however, has certain unforeseen disadvantages for the consumer; and then but the market-niches created by those disadvantages — like people's stressfully vain repulsion at their own videophonic appearance — are ingeniously filled via sheer entrepreneurial verve; and yet the very advantages of these ingenious disadvantage-compensations seem all too often to undercut the original high-tech advance, resulting in consumer-recidivism and curve-closure and massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors.

(Don’t you love the way this brainiac writes! For example, the “massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors” punch at the end of this long-breath stretch of three sentences roped together by 3 semi-colons and 1 colon.)

One should note, also, in reference to the Schtitt-Cantor rant we discussed prior, that the turning point of any such curve is defined by the limit of that curve’s 1st derivative = 0. This limit supposes a continuum (I hear Cantor coming), and the intellectual ability to traverse it (transcend it) in a finite number of steps.

I think DFW is trying to use Calculus as a metaphor here, as we saw in the quote Hugh just posted, e.g.

“You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution...”,

but the jury is still out for this reader on whether this is a ham-fisted metaphor or not.

I’ve also noted, with the patience of a 2nd reader, the profusion of references to “ellipse” in the opening scene, and the profusion of references to “circle” in both the scene where the Moms is roto-tilling her backyard, and very much so in the section describing the physical layout of the ETA. In both cases it is a "squaring the circle" metaphor, which again gets us back to Calculus and those pesky Real Numbers.
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